


burning in the black of spring

by lellabeth



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-12
Updated: 2015-04-18
Packaged: 2018-02-20 21:20:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2443517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lellabeth/pseuds/lellabeth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky’s never anything more than vapor, slipping through the gaps between his fingers and melting away.</p>
<p>Just once, just one time, Steve wants to close those gaps.</p>
<p>Just once, he wants to grab and grasp and never let go.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. there is no beginning, there is no end

**Author's Note:**

> have faith. 
> 
> song for this chapter: Black - Pearl Jam.

_ Now_

Steve knew there was something wrong from the very minute he’d woken up.

He could feel it, from the way all the hairs on his body prickled in unison, one big wave of foreboding setting his skin alight. His muscles ached, his mouth was dry, and his suit felt suffocatingly tight.

That was the first sign.

He’d rushed across the city, walked through the main doors of Stark Tower and found Tony’s assistant waiting to escort him to one of the conference rooms. Her heels clacked loudly all the way down the tiled floor of the hall, the sound reverberating in Steve’s skull until it drowned out the pounding of his too-fast heartbeat.

She didn’t speak the whole way.

That was the second sign.

The third was the solemn, set lines on the faces of everyone gathered there. He’d never seen Tony look somber, hadn’t even known it was possible. He’d never known Hawkeye to avert his gaze either, but he did now, looking at the floor like it was his next target.

The only one who’d look at him was Natasha.

And the expression on her face - that was the final sign, the one with neon lights and fifty-foot-tall letters.

The way she stared, it made his knees buckle.

No, no, _no._

“Bucky,” he breathes, and the ghosts he always sees out of the corner of his eyes are swirling right before him now. Bucky in his uniform, Bucky bloodied and bruised, Bucky laughing and breathing life into Steve’s heart. He tries so hard to block those visions out, but they’re always one step behind him, crawling over his shoulder in the dark of night. Bucky’s never anything more than vapor, slipping through the gaps between his fingers and melting away.

Just once, just one time, Steve wants to close those gaps.

Just once, he wants to grab and grasp and never let go.

And now Natasha’s here, her usually-sharp eyes almost mournful. He knows before she even speaks the words, but they somehow don’t register. It’s like he’s underwater, his life nothing more than fraying scraps that are soaked through and crumbling.

Crumbling, all around him.

Those hands, those hands of his that always end up empty, they try to cling now. They clench so hard they turn into claws, gripping the empty air. He knows. He does. But somewhere deep inside, pulling up from the pit of his stomach, right from the base of his spine, there’s a slick dredge of hope. He doesn’t want to believe - can’t let himself, not when it hurts so much to even consider, and so he forms words he knows are lies before they even leave his lips.

“You found him?” Is that really his voice, that strangled, hurting mess of noise? He clears his throat, but the lump lodged in it refuses to loosen. He looks around the room at people who have become his friends in this new world that seems full of enemies, but Natasha is the only one who’ll meet his eye.

“We found him, _golubchik._ ” Natasha doesn’t show emotion, would cut off her own arm before she’d cry, but there’s a definite waver in her voice. Dove, she calls him, little dove. There’s always a steel note of irony overlaying the affection, and that’s just so Natasha that the name has become an anchor to him. But now - now he hates the way her tongue curls around those syllables, how her voice sounds as she speaks it. It shakes, fucking _trembles_ , and Steve feels like there’s a razorblade pressed to the veins inside his wrist. His mouth tastes like the blood that’d pour out, coal-red against the blue of his suit. He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe.

“Bucky’s dead, Steve. I’m sorry,” she says, and that’s wrong too. Because Natasha is never sorry, not for anything. But she’s sorry for this - sorry for Steve - and that’s when he realizes that she’s speaking actual real words and what’s she saying, and then it’s like his brain turns off until everything is bright, stark white.

It takes two solid minutes for Steve to realize that the noise of a wounded animal crying for its pack is actually him, crying for Bucky. Aching, with ice in his veins and a knot where his heart should be, for Bucky.

He’s desperately trying to pull in air, but each breath hits his lungs like tar. There’s a constant chorus of _oh my fucking god, Bucky is dead_ running through his mind, trailing out of his eyes in wet lines that track his cheeks.

And he knows he should be embarrassed. He knows Tony and Clint and Natasha are all watching him fall to pieces, that there are probably a hundred people who can hear these awful noises he’s making.

He can’t seem to stop.

He’s shaking, too full of hurt to stay still. Has anything ever hurt this much before? He's had bullets lodged inside his skin, had ten-ton fists aimed at his face, but nothing before  
has ever hurt like this. It's the pain of a broken bone refusing to knit back together, rebreaking with every breath.

Breaking, always, always breaking.

Never healing.

His skin feels too tight, his spine so brittle he can barely keep upright.

So he doesn’t.

He slumps to the floor gracelessly, not caring how he looks.

For once, he’s not Captain America.

For once, he’s not a perfect bastion of strength.

For once, he’s just Steve, stripped back to his fragile heart.

It’s freeing, finally letting go of that need to be proper, of the constant drive to never put a foot out of place. Funny how Tony has spent hours making his suit the lightest, most aerodynamic thing possible, and it still weighs heavier on Steve’s shoulders than anything ever has.

Steve’s so tired of pretending, doesn’t have it in him right now, not when the last person he’s ever loved has just been ripped away.

Just like all the others.

The memories are unbidden and unwanted, lancing into his tender skin. Bucky’s face so close to his, their breaths meeting in the way Steve wished their bodies would, Bucky’s blue eyes staring into his. Those eyes would change like the seasons, indigo to powder, navy to ultramarine. And Steve knew that was impossible, that Bucky’s eyes didn’t really change, but goddamn if they didn’t shine like they were backlit every time Steve made him smile.

He’ll never see that smile again. He’ll never get to count the freckles across Bucky’s nose or see how the scar through his eyebrows distorts how the hair there grows. He’ll never map the way Bucky’s right dimple carves a deeper hollow than the left. He’ll never watch the way sunlight seems to kiss every inch of Bucky, just the way Steve wishes he could.

That’s not what hurts the most, though. That’s not the thing making Steve’s insides feel like they’re steeped in turpentine, burning through his skin. That right is reserved for the death of a million dreams he thought he’d given up years ago, the ones that taste like ashes on his tongue. The ones where he’d finally gained the courage to tell Bucky how he felt, where he’d just grasped Bucky when he sat so close to Steve, where they were together and Steve’s hands didn’t feel so constantly empty.

The dreams in which Bucky was his.

The dreams in which Bucky loved him back.

The vault of his heart kept them locked up tight - too tight, too confined, too dark to ever be found.

And now, they’ll never come to life. They’ll be nothing more than wasted pockets of space in Steve’s brain, like tiny little knives that never lose their edge.

Steve can’t breathe, can’t see, can’t do anything.

There’s nothing, not now.

Not ever again.

Natasha’s hand is soft as it meets the crown of his head, a gentle stroke through his hair. She speaks to him in Russian, her soft tone making the harsh words sound like a song.

He closes his eyes and revels in the comfort of it.

Just for a minute.

Just for a second.

Then she’s gone, they’re all gone, nothing more than a whisper on the wind that swept through his life like a hurricane and stole everything.

There’s a supernova going off inside his chest, sonic bursts of light ricocheting around his ribcage. Tony told him about supernovas once, said that even though they were happening billions of years away, they were so bright they were still visible.

They could outshine whole galaxies, Tony had said. Brighter than anything imaginable.

Steve knew those supernovas had nothing on Bucky’s smile.

And now that star - that blinding, beaming, glowing supernova has burnt out.

Steve hasn’t prayed in years, but he does now. He prays that Bucky’s still alive out there somewhere. He prays that Bucky’s just got better at hiding, that he’s managed to evade capture yet again.

He prays that he could still be in that block of ice that was his home for sixty years, because the world sure felt warmer then.

As his sobs fade to nothing and the oblivion of sleep threatens to swallow him whole, there’s only one prayer left on his lips, bitter and pleading.

_Please let Bucky have known I loved him._

 

 


	2. then I look at you, and the world's alright with me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> song for the chapter: Lovely Day - alt-J  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIboZ8Hi6mY

_Then_

It started in his throat.

First it was just a soreness, then it turned into a dull ache. It became a series of sharp pricks whenever he swallowed to soothe the dryness, and it ended up a roaring, burning pain that had him unable to eat.

Not that there was ever much food to go ‘round, not even with Bucky sneaking him an extra piece of bread he’d filched from one of the other boys, but now he couldn’t eat even the soup served on Tuesdays at the home for adolescent boys. The last thing Steve needs is to lose any more weight, but his whole throat is swollen shut - he’s lucky his nose isn’t blocked too, or he’d be real stuck for ways to breathe.

So he stays in his bunk with the itchy blanket, sweating through his thin underclothes. He’s always been sickly, especially as a child, yet these symptoms feel so much worse than any he’s had before.

Maybe because this is the first sickness he’s faced without the gentle hand of his mother against his forehead, or her quiet whispers in his ear.

Like the winter they couldn’t afford firewood and his asthma-ridden chest had caught the worst cold, and after a whole week of him laying in bed, she’d said, “ _Little Stevie, you need to get you better. You can’t be doll dizzy only for your Ma all the time, boy-o_ ,” and he’d laughed so hard he almost coughed up what was left of his lungs. Or when he’d gotten the stomach flu from meat his mother had found behind the butcher’s shop, and she’d told him he couldn’t save the world if some bad beef could bring him to his knees.

More than once, when his difficulty breathing had kept them both awake at night, crystalline-cloud puffs of his hard-fought breaths wheezing into the air between his bed and his mother’s place on the couch, she’d moved to sit beside him. Her too-thin body was wrapped up in a threadbare bathrobe and the hard edges of her wrists grated against his jutting spine, but when she wrapped him up in her arms, he’d never known comfort like it. She was his mother and even when she was too skinny because she could only afford Steve’s medications instead of their food that month, she was sweet softness and an embrace he always felt safe in.

So this time around, with his throat feeling like someone has set a firework off inside it, he fists a hand and bites down on it. That pain, that sharp sting and press of his teeth against his own skin, hurts less than the lack of warm arms around him, the absence of his Ma’s voice in his ear. And if in amongst all the sweat dripping off him, if some of those droplets are actually tears, Steve isn’t going to acknowledge that at all.

The nuns at the home were praying over him constantly, knowing there were too few doctors around and no money with which to pay them even if one could be called. So instead they came to Steve’s bedside and wiped away the moisture and grime from his face with cool cloths, kissing his forehead when they were done and he’d been wiped clean. They brought bowls of just chicken broth, willing him to swallow just one sip, just one more sip. The other boys kept a wide berth, like they were sharks who could smell the sickness deep in his bloodstream.

Bucky was the only one who came close.

He sat at the side of Steve’s bed and told him about his day, about getting into bust-ups with boys much bigger than him, about winking at Sally-Ann across the street just to see her father’s face go red.

About being a soldier with Steve by his side, fighting as brothers.

He whispers how they’ll conquer the world and become heroes, and he ignores the way Steve’s body curls around the shape of his as if by reflex - even though that’s wrong and dirty, and the nuns would lash them both with the cane if they ever saw.

But Bucky, it’s like he can see beyond Steve’s prominent ribs and sallow skin, like he can see what’s underneath. And he sees the aching, hollow space right inside Steve’s chest, the hope that got buried next to the bodies of his parents. So on the real bad nights, when Steve coughs so hard he tastes rust, Bucky will sneak a hand under that itchy, too-hot blanket of Steve’s.

Bucky’s fingers, scabbed and scarred and rough, they’re even gentler than Ma’s when they wrap around his.

One evening - Steve’s lost track of all time, but he’s just about coherent enough to recognize the fading light outside the steel-barred-windows, one evening everything changes. The rest of the boys are down in the dinner hall, so Steve notices as soon as Bucky comes in clutching a cotton sack like the ones the nuns use for laundry. There are gentle clicking noises coming from inside, the soft snick of glass bottles softly colliding echoing around the room. He perches on Steve’s bedside and opens the sack, pulling out a brown tincture bottle. Steve watches through heavy lids as Bucky mixes a few drops into his water before helping Steve sit up and holding the cup to his lips. The taste is foul and his throat is still too swollen to swallow properly, but Bucky saying “ _Come on, Stevie_ ,” has him determined to finish the whole cup.

They do this again and again over the next few days, Bucky hiding the tincture bottles under his bed. Steve starts feeling alive again - more alive than he’s felt in a long time, actually - and eventually he leaves his bed for the first time in a fortnight, his legs shakier than when he’d imagined standing on top of the Flatiron after his Ma took him on a trip into the city. He even manages to start eating solid food, Bucky filling his pockets with whatever food he can carry up from the dinner hall. His chest is still tight but it’s not so foreign now, back to his usual asthmatic state.

It isn’t long before the tincture bottles are found by one of the nuns. Bucky disappears for the afternoon and comes back into the room that evening walking stiffly and biting the inside of his cheek, wincing slightly when he sits down on Steve’s bunk.

Steve swallows, chest back to being impossibly tight. “I’m real sorry you got in trouble for me.”

“Don’t be,” Bucky says, voice hoarse, red-rimmed eyes locked on Steve’s. “It was worth it.”

When Bucky sneaks his hand under Steve’s blanket, Steve can feel every one of his severely swollen knuckles, skin cracked around the joints.

It’s still the best thing Steve’s ever felt.

That night, for the first time since his Ma died, Steve doesn’t cry himself to sleep.

 


	3. the night so black that the darkness hummed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter song: In the Woods Somewhere - Hozier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMk-Nb_viR8

_ Now _

It hurt all over.

He thought the crash landing seventy years ago had been the worst pain he’d ever feel. The impact and the encroaching coldness stole his breath and his heartbeat and the world as he knew it. He’d been Captain America, the perfect hero, as he flew that jet straight into the snow.

Saving others, condemning himself.

He’d come to minutes afterward as his body started shaking from the cold, dazed and hurting from how his head smacked into the console. In that moment, he wasn’t Captain America anymore. He remembered a line from the Bible his Ma had read to him at bedtime. In the cavernous mouth of that ship, he’d become a small, scared boy stuck in the skeleton of a super soldier, crying out into oblivion and praying someone would hear him. His breath had been nothing more than a white whisper, fading to mist. His voice, nothing more than a hoarse, stuttering whisper. God, how he’d cried for Peggy. Until his voice was totally gone and his eyes were swollen with tears that froze as soon as they rolled down his cheeks, he’d called her name into the radio.

He only heard silence.

He’d known the risk of flying that Red Skull, had known he wouldn’t be making it out alive. But knowing that and accepting it were two different things, and Steve’s last memories of _Before_ are of a dark flare of resentment crawling across his chest.

In his final few minutes as the blood in his veins turned to ice, his thoughts switched to Bucky. For years, he’d trained himself to think of Bucky in black and white, only in binary - as man and as friend, as soldier and as comrade.

As first love and as last heartbreak.

Except that wasn’t really true, because his heart had never stopped being broken. It was still in pieces, stuck together with the glue of Peggy and her promises of dancing. But Steve knew deep down inside, in that part of himself that not even the super serum could fix, that he’d never love Peggy the way she deserved.

Not when he was helplessly, hopelessly, painfully in love with Bucky. 

Bucky was brilliant technicolor, and back then the world hadn't put rainbows on flags.

His love was quiet, steady. 

Sinful.

Guilt left him colder than the snow and ice ever could.

When he died, Bucky’s face, one he knew better than his own, was burning bright on the backs of his eyelids.

Steve should have known even in death, life would find a way to screw him.

He got caught in a cocoon made of sacrifice, a web that caught around his neck like a noose. Steve never wanted to be a hero. He just wanted the chance to fight.

And he had. He fought with the best of them, fire and brimstone wrapped up in a fierce sense of righteousness and the purest heart to ever step into battle. He’d fought alongside good men, ones who shared his desire for a peaceful world.

They’d been living while he’d been caught up in that block of ice, perpetually frozen.

Then he’d been brought back to life.

The first breath he took when he woke up from the ice made his lungs burn. He breathed again and again and again, ignoring how foreign it felt.

When he’d run out into Times Square, he’d seen all those bright billboards and honking taxis and he’d realized that it wasn’t 1943 and he’d never get to dance with Peggy and everyone he’d ever known and loved was dead.

And then Steve had learned there was a pain worse than freezing.

When he’d seen Bucky alive - even as unrecognizable as he was - he thought the ghosts had finally migrated from his nightmares and into his days too. When he’d realized what Bucky had been turned into, he’d thought he’d finally found the reason he’d been brought back from the dead.

To save Bucky, just like Bucky had always saved him.

He’d failed. He’d failed and now Bucky was dead again but Steve was still alive and he hated it. He had always cared for the needs of others over those of himself, but now - now he was selfish.

He ignored Natasha when she brought him food; he turned his back when Bruce stood in his doorway.

He kept his curtains shut.

He put his shield inside the wardrobe and closed the doors.

He lay in his bed and made his own little world under the comforter, one where breathing wasn’t a fight against head and heart, where everything wasn’t imploding all around him.

He cried into his pillow, wondering how he could feel so hollow and so full of everything all at once; lips murmuring ‘ _Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me’,_ thinking of Bucky when he should have been thinking of God and drifting to sleep each night wondering if there was all that much difference between the two.


	4. I'm too young to feel this old

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> song for this chapter: Kings of Leon - Cold Desert

_ Then _

“Come on, Stevie. It’ll be a roarer.”

“I’m hurtin’ all over.”

He’d been down at the docks that whole day, helping shift crates of fish. He’d had to work twice as hard as the other boys to prove to the bossman he could do the job, considering some of the crates were wider than he is. It became blazing hot as the afternoon rolled around, and his skin still felt sticky with sweat, the smell of fish guts clinging to him like a second skin. He should have washed up as soon as he got home, but he sat down on his bunk to take his shoes off and found he couldn’t get back up. His underfed, overworked muscles were sore in ways he hadn’t felt before, not even during that summer he had a job bussing tables in the diner down the street.

“I got a real sweet broad coming along.”

Steve’s stomach turned, his insides burning hotter than the midday sun. “Yeah?”

“Nice enough gal, but bird-brained. Enough other assets to make up for it.”

Steve swallowed hard, wondering how many times a wound could reopen before it’d finally seal shut. His… this want, this need he felt for Bucky, this _thing_ was a festering gunshot, right underneath his breastbone. It pulsed and thrummed and hurt and hurt, and it never stopped. There were days where it was dulled, where he thought maybe his prayers had been answered and the sickness inside him had gone away, but it always came back when he saw Bucky smile, or laugh, or just breathe.

Steve had learned long ago that the prayers of people like him don’t get heard.

So he was stuck in this weird divide between heaven and hell, toeing the line of having Bucky close enough to touch but feeling like his arms were never long enough to reach. And knowing deep down that even if he did, even if his fingertips brushed that stubbled jaw, that he’d have to watch Bucky recoil.

From him.

As always, Steve swallowed a second time, just in case that’d make the lump in his throat go away.

As always, it didn’t.

“This the waitress?”

Bucky huffed a laugh. “She was last week.”

“Right, right. What does this one do?”

“She’s a dancer.”

Steve felt his eyebrows rise. “We talking the kind who dances sets along to a gramophone, or the kind that works the night shift at Lowry’s?”

Bucky smirked. “What do you think?”

Yeah, okay. Okay. “Sounds like you don’t need me there, then.”

Bucky moved forward, hand clapping down on Steve’s shoulder and nearly causing him to topple over. “‘Course I need you there, punk. You’re my best pal.”

For a fractured, flying, blissful second, Steve felt warm, all the way down to his clunky feet.

“And anyways, I asked her to bring a friend for you.”

No matter how often it comes, no matter how many times a day he tastes it, heartbreak is always bitter.

“Okay, Buck,” Steve said, weariness and the thinnest thread of something hopeless in his tone.

Bucky eyes him closely, too close, and Steve looks away. There are moments like this, little glimmers of time when he’s sure how he feels is written right across his face.

“You got ten minutes to get that fish stink off-a you and change, Rogers,” Bucky says before he turns to leave, and Steve knows another moment has passed, another ledge over a hundred-foot drop he’s crossed by the skin of his teeth, and he sighs.

Even a cat has only nine lives, and Steve can’t help but wonder when his are gonna finally run out.

~~

“So, Paula said you work together?”

The girl has too much rouge on her cheeks and there’s lipstick bleeding into the lines around her pursed mouth, and she hasn’t said a word to Steve since Bucky introduced them and she’d said “ _This_ is Steve?”

Steve wonders if the “ _yeah, you got a problem with that?”_ Bucky had immediately shot back at her was the cause of her silence, but he doubts it.

He sighs as another of his questions to her goes unanswered, his eyes straying to the way Bucky’s slacks cling to the contours of his thighs with every step. He tries to look away, but there’s just something so comforting about that flex of muscle, that show of quiet solidarity and strength. His own body has always been weak and sickly, but Bucky’s is tall, sturdy. Like a tree you’d shelter under during a sudden storm, except Steve’s storm has lasted years and at some point Bucky became the one he was drowning in.

He’s looking at Bucky’s backside now, and his whole face is hot and his nails are digging hard into his palms and his mouth is dry but he can’t look away, doesn’t want to. He wants to stare until he has the flesh mapped well enough that he can recreate it in his sketchbook. He likes to draw in the middle of the night with darkness all around to hide all his dirty secrets. He’s drawn Bucky in pencil and in charcoal, once with chalk and twice with a ballpoint pen when he got really desperate. He’s filled sketchbooks too expensive to keep replacing, filled with pages upon pages of Bucky’s face, torso, profile. There was even one page dedicated to the curve and bone of Bucky’s ankles when he walked barefoot through the park in summer.

One time, Steve even drew them together. It was a rough pencil sketch of them sitting side by side, Bucky’s arm wrapped around his shoulders. He’d stared at it until the lines of their bodies merged into one and the tears dripping from his chin had made the graphite blur, and then he’d torn out the page and ripped it into a million shreds, tearing himself to pieces too.

“You and Jamie sure seem to be good friends,” he hears, and his head snaps to the side. It takes him a minute to realize who she means. It hits him like a jagged rock to the stomach. Cruel-squinted eyes and set mouth, and he watches her gaze flicker between him and Bucky, like the she’s realized his red cheeks are the color of love.

“We’ve known each other a long time,” he replies.

“Mmm. You live together?”

She’s staring at him now, right through him, right to the rotten core. Steve feels like he’s having the worst asthma attack of his life, because he can’t catch his breath.

“We share an apartment,” Steve says, all strangled and stupidly desperate. If she hadn’t guessed before, she has now, and the look in her eyes confirms it.

“Paula,” she calls, and Steve’s never felt so fucking terrified.

He remembers hours spent on his knees in a shadowed church, how the holy water felt like fire against his skin, how the words of a priest felt like his own personal condemnation. He knows about institutions where they send men like him, the hushed whispers of electric shocks to purge their minds.

This is one mistake not even Bucky will be able to save him from.

Then she says, “This place is making me feel sick to my stomach. I’m going home.”

Steve doesn’t hear her friend reply, doesn’t hear Bucky trying to convince her to stay. All he can hear is his heartbeat in his ears, the echo reverberating around the brittle confines of his mind. His stomach lurches and suddenly he’s moving, stumbling into a run that’ll cause him to need him to need his inhaler in less than ten seconds.

Steve doesn’t care.

He just wants to get away, so he runs faster.

He makes it all the way out of the fair and four blocks down before he ends up double over, hands braced on his knees.

His whole body trembling, self-hatred like acid that eats a path through him, Steve screws his eyes shut.

When he can breathe again - as much as he can breathe after that, he begins to long walk home.

He moves slowly, each step a heavy thud despite his lean body.

He doesn’t run, not now.

There’s no point, not when he can’t outrun himself.

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter song: Bat For Lashes (originally Springsteen) - I'm On Fire http://youtu.be/Rhat3oUbNkw

Steve wishes Fury would stop shouting.

His head is pounding, the gash on his temple caused by his shield slicing against his skin still throbbing, hours later. He can still feel the bitter venom of adrenaline pulsing through his veins, each too-fast hummingbird heartbeat that echoes inside his chest.

Even when silence comes, it’s too loud. The other Avengers are all staring at him and it feels like his skin is stretched too tight across his bones, and then Coulson says something that includes the word ‘suicide attempt’. His voice cracks, _fucking cracks,_ and he’s never heard Phil sound anything but professional. It reminds him of when Natasha told him Bucky was dead.

Is dead.

He laughs, because how ironic that he can only talk of Bucky in present tense when it’s acknowledging that he’s dead. And it hits Steve again that Bucky is gone _forever_ , and Steve’s lost a lot of people - he’s even lost Bucky - but this loss isn’t one that goes away. It’s like a rogue wave, lapping and roiling and dragging him under into its mouth, devouring him whole until he’s drowning. It recedes sometimes but it always resurfaces, always comes back in a swell that takes the ground from right under his feet.

Steve looks up into Coulson’s face, grey with soot and ash but colorless and pale underneath, and then his vision blurs and he realizes somehow his laughter has turned to crying. Everyone’s watching him break down, seeing him sob right there. He should be embarrassed, but he’s not. He’s too tired.

He’s always tired.

He sleeps for hours at a time, taking naps just to break up the day. He has dreamless voids that he slips into, other times he wakes up sweating and with Bucky’s name tasting foul on his tongue. But no matter how much rest he gets, how long he lays prone in bed and does nothing more than stare up at his ceiling, he’s still so _damn_ tired.

Steve’s aware he’s not doing anything but reinforce what everyone’s thinking - that his jump was actually some impulse he hadn’t suppressed this time; that he saw all the meters of dead air below and all around him and couldn’t resist stepping into them.

There was a second - just a splinter of the time he’s not entitled to but somehow still has - where he was sinking through the air like a rock and the wind was slapping him square in the face, and he’d felt painfully alive for the first time in weeks. He’d been about to shout for Hulk or Iron Man to catch him, but then there’d been Natasha saying “Steve, Jesus _Christ_ ” all panicked and so unlike herself, and then he’d had the breath knocked out of him as metal arms smacked into his waist and dragged him back up into the air.

Metal arms, holding him tight.

The last time he’d felt a metal arm, it’d been pressing against his throat, the silver fingers pressing into his windpipe.

He remembered Bucky’s eyes. He hadn’t been sure at first who he was grappling with when Bucky had the mask on and tackled him to the ground. All he’d known was the faint air of recognition, of someone he didn’t know but he felt sure he’d seen before, like a long-lost friend he hadn’t seen in years but caught sight of across a busy street.

He was right, in a way - except Bucky was someone he hadn’t seen in decades, and he was meant to be dead.

It had taken long seconds for Steve to realize he was choking and not just seeing a ghost, and then he’d been forced to fight against someone he was only ever used to fighting _with._

And through it all, he’d stared into those eyes, seeing years of friendship glimmering in the backs of them underneath blind rage.

If Steve closes his own eyes and tries hard enough, he can still feel the flex of Bucky’s fingers around his throat.

Maybe that’s why he’s choking now.

There are too many words trying to come out of his mouth and he feels like he’s on fire, breathing in nothing but smoke. Someone’s hand rests on his shoulder, feather-light, and it feels like the only thing keeping him together. He brings his own hand up to cling to it, wrapping their fingers into his own like it’ll anchor him.

His hands are shaking so hard he’s sure he’s jostling the arm of whoever’s touching him and his palm is drenched with cold sweat, but that hand grips firmly to his. A thumb runs over the back of his knuckles and somehow, impossibly, he gulps a breath. It stutters and shakes so he takes another, and another and suddenly his lungs are aching because he hasn’t taken a full breath in what feels like years.

He closes his eyes and opens his heart.

“I didn’t jump,” he says, and then he realizes he doesn’t want to start with a lie. He feels like all he’s ever lived is one big, rotten, hurting lie, and where has it gotten him? Breaking apart in a room with metal walls.

“Okay, I jumped,” he says, and the hand holding his spasms for a second, and this time it’s Steve who squeezes tight. And he can do this, he can be the strong one, he can give comfort. “But I didn’t try to kill myself. I wouldn’t do that. I… I’ve thought about it.” God, he’s barely thought of anything else lately. “I’d never go through with it. I don’t want to kill myself. I just, just... don’t want to be alive.”

He looks up briefly, just enough to see the sympathy etched into the faces of the only people he knows in this new world. But there’s more, too - there’s understanding from every single one, and it’s as much a relief as it is a sadness.

“You weren’t trying to hurt yourself?” Coulson asks, his voice somehow both breathy and jagged.

“No,” Steve says, honestly. “I knew someone would be there to catch me.”

Tony clears his throat and Steve looks over to him, surprised at the solemn set of his face. “We’re all here to catch you, Cap. Any time you need it.”

Tony’s tone tells Steve he gets it, that he understands how it feels to be in free-fall even when you’re standing on solid ground.

There are murmured whispers of agreement around the table.

“I think that maybe…” Steve swallows. “Maybe I won’t get Bucky back,” he says, because there’s still some part of him holding on. “But I still have things to live for.”

Once the words are out, there’s just the slightest loosening of the giant knot his body’s been tangled into. He unfurls slightly, shoulders straightening, spine arching.

That hand holding his moves into his hair, and Natasha’s voice is soft when she whispers Russian into his ear. It’s soothing, soft, almost like a lullaby, and Steve thinks he’s dropped into a parallel universe.

It’s Clint who saves them all.

“That’s nice and all, CapAm, but all we’re really asking is for a heads-up over the comms next time you forget you’re not wearing Falcon’s wings before you go skydiving. That okay?”

His laugh this time couldn’t be different to the one from minutes before. It’s not bitter or weighed down - it’s unrestrained and loud, and somewhere deep deep down, it lets Steve know that somehow his world will rebuild itself yet again, that somehow things will be okay.

Looking around at the relieved, dirt-smudged faces of his team, that spark of hope lights him up, a candle in an ever-dark room, and Steve grabs on to it so tight it can’t fade away.

It fills him up, steadies him, warms him from the inside out. For the first time since the ice, he feels safe.

So safe he lets his guard drop.

So safe he doesn't realize he’s in deep, dark waters until a fortnight later when the wave pulls him under.

Then there are more words, ones like " _mistaken intel_ " and " _captured in Serbia_ " and finally " _he has no recollection of who he is_ " and his world implodes in a cataclysm of a million shining colors.

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter song: Barenaked Ladies - wrap your arms around me (variety recording version) http://youtu.be/lkiBEwOTeWo

_Then_

For a group dubbed the Howling Commandos, they cut across the night like a shadow.

Endless miles of trekking through the wilds of Germany, unable to speak above a murmur on a mission so covert it didn’t officially exist. Only the stars peeking through the dense treetops provided any light, and Steve could hear Dum Dum hissing that he was going to brain Falsworth the next time he stumbled. The warmth of those stars seemed even more millions of light years away than they actually were, and not even the hours of brisk pace and layers of uniform could keep their bones from aching with cold. When they finally stopped to set up camp, they unloaded nothing more than that night’s meager, over-salted food and threadbare canvas tents. They slept packed together like the sardines Steve’s mom used to make on Sundays, four men to one tent and three to the other.

Because Steve’s luck was both amazing and goddamn rotten, he ended up sleeping next to Bucky, their bodies shivering in the frigid air inside the tent. Jones was on the other side of Bucky, snoring away like a freight train, heedless of anything but getting some rest. Steve was somehow exhausted yet wide awake, his new muscles still too big, still too unfamiliar. He felt awkward and uncomfortable, flat on his too-broad back and trying not to move for fear of touching Bucky.

Even through their sleeping bags, he could feel the other man’s body heat, and it was enough to chase away the chill of the sub-zero temperatures all around him. Just the thought of Bucky’s sleeping face, eyelashes brushing his cheeks like the wings of a butterfly closing, and Steve was using all his self-control not to start squirming around.

But he must have moved and Bucky definitely wasn’t asleep, because the next thing he knew, there was a whispered curse and the sound of a zip coming undone, and suddenly there were strong, muscled arms over and around him.

Steve didn’t move.

“Christ, impossible for a man to sleep with you all stiff next to him,” Bucky grumbled quietly, voice sleep-rough, like sandpaper rubbing away at the hard edges of Steve’s heart. Bucky’s arm was heavy across his stomach, like an anchor, and Steve curled his hands into fists so he wouldn’t grab onto it.

And then that arm moved and Bucky’s hand was spanning the bottom half of his torso, rubbing quickly, fingertips Steve swore were burning into his skin even through the uniform he still wore.

It felt like every dream Steve had ever had.

“That warming you up?”

It curled sour in his gut, knowing Bucky was only doing this because he wanted to sleep and he thought the cold was what was making Steve so rigid next to him. But even Captain America had to be selfish sometimes, and so Steve just whispered back a yes and let Bucky keep rubbing that big hand across him.

“Too big to keep yourself warm now, eh?”

“Not sure I ever did a great job of that when I was smaller,” Steve said, mouth curling up at the edges. He’d been the sickliest child ever all year round, but especially so in winter. The cold burrowed into his lungs and settled in his chest until the first thaw of spring, when he finally got to take a breath again.

“Need to get you a scarf. It’d go great with the brown,” Bucky said, poking the edge of Steve’s coat. “I’m sure there are a ton of gals who’d be over the moon to knit for Captain America.”

Steve snorted. “Because the gals just love me now.”

His voice was bitter, thready with hurt he couldn’t hide, and it was strange that this new body had made him more insecure. But it wasn’t his, and it felt like a lie every time he caught a pretty face turned his way or felt eyes linger.

Bucky’s hand paused in its motions.

“You’re better than all’a that, y’know. The girls who like the shield better than they like the man. All the… the showboating and the tours, I’m happy for you. But it’s-- you shoulda had all this, even before. You deserved it.”

Steve’s heart was thudding in his chest. “No one wanted to know that Steve. Even now, people don’t care about Steve. It’s all about Captain America.” He doesn’t know where the words were coming from, those half-thoughts he’d never let himself examine too close. He knew that it made Bucky’s hand ball into a fist, fingers clenched tight around Steve’s shirt.

“I cared about you, still care now, no matter what uniform you’re wearing. I knew you before all this and I’ll know you after it, and it don’t matter an ounce to me. You’re still the same boy whose Mama took me in when my own was too busy chasing men, still the same one who gave me the only stuffed bear he had left when the other boys teased me for having nightmares. You mighta been smaller before, but you’ve never been _small_ , Steve. Not to me."

And with that, he removed his hand and rolled over, his back scant inches away.

It felt like an insurmountable distance, even in this foreign body.

So Steve lay still, eyes sightless but blurred all the same, heart on fire and stomach aching, and all around him was dark.

But Bucky’s words, they were a star brighter than any dotting the sky, and Steve knew he’d never be lost as long as he has those to guide him.


	7. Chapter 7

_Now_

“I want to see him.”

Fury shakes his head. His hands are on his hips and he’s blocking the room’s only exit like that’d ever stop Steve if he was trying to leave. “Not a good idea, Captain.”

He grinds his back teeth together. “I wasn’t asking permission.”

Fury’s face hardens. “Good, because you won’t be getting it. The Winter Soldier is extremely volatile to say the least. I won’t risk sending you in there.”

He knows what Fury thinks, what everyone thinks. They’ve decided his love for Bucky is compromising him, a smoke screen stopping him from seeing the situation as it really is. But Steve is the only one who knows Bucky rather than the Winter Soldier. He’s the only one who knows the boy from Brooklyn rather than the product of some lab. He’s sure that there are thousands of secrets locked up in the frozen synapses of Bucky’s brain; he’s aware Bucky might only remember him as a mission to be completed or a target to be exterminated. But he also knows that he’s alive now mostly due to Bucky - Bucky, who brought him medicine and stolen food, Bucky, who jumped into any fight that Steve started. Bucky, his best friend.

Bucky, who he has loved since he even knew what love was. Probably even before.

And Bucky deserves someone fighting for him. Not for the intel or the asset potential, for the person who’s been trapped inside the cell of his own body for decades now.

He squares his shoulders and straightens to his full height. Steve works hard to be unassuming outside of battle situations, despite his stature, but not here. Not now.

This might be the most important battle he’ll ever fight.

“With all due respect, sir,” he says, and he knows Fury recognizes it as the insult he intended, “I am not yours to direct as you choose. I want to see Bucky because I know what it’s like to wake up in an unfamiliar time and not have anything to anchor you. I don’t care if he doesn’t remember me. I don’t care if he tries to hurt me. I won’t leave him to face this alone, and you will not stop me.”

“I could have the halls full of guards in seconds,” Fury says softly.

Steve leans in. “And I will leave every one unconscious on the ground if it means getting to him. Do not test me on this, Nick. I respect you, but I don’t owe you anything. My loyalty does not lie with SHIELD, not now. My loyalty is to him. Don’t send your men to be mowed down like goddamn overgrown grass.”

“Good to know Captain America isn’t immune to making threats.”

Steve’s top lip curls. “It may be a threat, but it sure as hell isn’t empty.”

“If Steve goes, I go with him,” he hears Natasha say, and the fact she doesn’t say Captain isn’t missed by anyone.

“And me,” adds Clint.

Tony chimes in with a “well hell, I’d hate to miss a party,” and there’s no more than three seconds of silence before Bruce says quietly, “I don’t think there’d be any halls left after Hulk was done.”

Steve has to close his eyes for a second, because in the wreckage of his new life, his team have proven to be the keystone. He is filled with gratitude that all these people would follow him into the flames and risk being burnt for a fight that isn’t theirs.

When he opens them again, he sees Fury eyeing him with something that looks like respect. Steve knows he should probably be ashamed of the way he’s played the situation, but he figures it’s no worse than the multitude of ways he’s been manipulated since being pulled out of the ice. He will tear down the sky and crack the Earth right down its middle if it means getting to Bucky. By the look on Fury’s face, he’s learning that.

“What’ll it be, Nick?”

Fury stares at him for a second more before stepping aside out of the doorway, head turned to stare into the hall beyond. As Steve and the rest of the team file out, Fury doesn’t acknowledge them.

It’s only as they’re six feet away that Nick’s voice calls out to him. “He won’t remember you.”

Steve stops and turns back. “I know,” he says, because he truly does, even if it makes everything inside him roil. “But I remember him, and that’s enough.”

He carries on walking to the elevator, his team striding behind him. 


End file.
